Karaoke comes to Shazam

Popular music identification service Shazam has bought the company Tunezze, which synchronises lyrics to music and now features in the Shazam application.

Shazam has made its first corporate acquisition with the Silicon Valley based lyrical software company, whose feature set has immediately appeared with Shazam LyricPlay.

This capability comes to the paid for Encore application, with viewable real-time lyric synchronisation to music being played – for that added Karaoke element to the software.

The feature adds to the consumer musical discovery experience for mobile devices, which doesn’t stop at just music identification for the track being listened to for the song title or artist.

These displayed lyrics are worked into the music at source, with Shazam incorporating the acquired company’s abilities into the core technology with improving its overall accuracy as well. This is along with an added layer of animation with visualisations that create an engaging way to see the songs' words.

Shazam has now built up a database of song lyrics to compliment this feature, which contains 25,000 of the most popular songs identified by the app and grows each day, with more being added to the library all the time.

Shazam LyricPlay works by tagging a song and then tapping the new LyricPlay icon when it appears, followed by turning the device horizontally to watch the lyrics scroll, jump, pop or slide in real-time on the iPhone or iPod Touch.